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Follow This 4-Step Process to Narrow Your Focus and Go Big
We are often told that we need to tune out distractions and focus on what’s important.
But how do you determine what is truly important and worthy of your attention?
Here is the 4-step process I live by to achieve supreme focus and maximize impact:
Step 1: Mindfully experience and absorb
The first step to focusing is actually doing research. In this phase, you want to mindfully experience and absorb as much information as possible, and begin to form opinions about what really matters.
This is like reading a business book with a highlighter. You are reading the entire book and absorbing as much as possible, but also noting along the way what resonates with you. You will not be able to retain all of the book’s information, so you mindfully start to disregard the fluff and identify the substance. At the end of step 1 (or at the end of the book in this example), you will have taken in a lot of information, and will end up with a series of highlighted passages reminding you of what you found to be meaningful.
Another example would be joining a new company in a managerial position. In your first 30 days on the job, it would be unwise to make major changes before you really know what’s going on. Instead, you want to take an inventory of the current strategies and tactics being used by the team, and start to form opinions about what is impactful to achieve your group’s overall objectives. At the end of this phase, you will have some hypotheses about the high-impact initiatives.
A third example would be a talented young athlete who tries a variety of sports. This would be like LeBron James playing basketball, football, and baseball as a 12-year old and starting to think about which ones he wants to continue in high school.
Step 2: Distill
At this point, you have taken in a lot of information and formed some initial hypotheses about what is important.
Step 2 is when you really start to narrow things down. This means you need to go back through your initial findings, and pit them up against each other to see what is important enough to continue moving forward.
